Svetlana Alliluyeva (Lana Peters), the last dissident from Josef Stalin's family, has died in the United States. Despite dramatic changes that have taken place in the world, the dictator's other descendants continue to defend the views of their famous (or infamous) ancestor. It appears that Svetlana inherited her dissenting views from her mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, who shot herself in 1932, leaving behind a letter for her husband that was "full of reproaches and accusations."
Svetlana was not an ideological dissident. Her rebellion above all represented a struggle for her personal freedom and her right to choose: friends, lovers, faith, weaknesses, whims.
Somewhere at the bottom of a long list of her contradictory values was her right to have her own views on ideologies and political regimes. Stalin's daughter was comfortable neither in the Soviet Union nor the United States. She was unable to settle in India, Switzerland, Britain or her father's native land, Georgia, although Georgians venerated her.
Svetlana Alliluyeva had two husbands and a number of lovers. She loved her children but did not share their views. A philologist, historian and translator, she is remembered above all for her memoirs. She lived off of the royalties from her most famous book, Twenty Letters to a Friend, which she wrote in 1963 about her father and life in the Kremlin.
The Soviet people mostly remember Svetlana's defection, even though each of her departures was sanctioned by a top official. Her first visit abroad in 1967, to take the ashes of her late fiance, Brajesh Singh, back to India, was approved by Alexei Kosygin.
Alliluyeva did not return from India. As she later wrote, the reasons for her defection were not political but human. "In those years, I paid my own tribute to blind idealization of the so-called free world. However, having found myself in this so-called free world, I was not free for one single day," she wrote.
Svetlana married U.S. architect William Wesley Peters in 1970, gave birth to a daughter and divorced two years later, keeping her new name, Lana Peters, through her final days. She probably wished to forget not only her unpleasant memories, but even her family name, Alliluyeva.
Lana Peters traveled widely around the world but, failing to find "heaven on earth," unexpectedly turned up in Moscow in 1984. Although life in the Soviet Union at that time differed greatly from that of the Stalinist era, she was unable to settle down in her old homeland. Two years later, she asked Mikhail Gorbachev to allow her to leave.
She was an unusual person whose striving for a "bright personal future" could not be mollified even by old age. Perhaps it was that striving for an impossible dream that makes Alliluyeva a Russian, not a woman of the world as many see her.
In the 1990s, she lived at the monastery of St. John in Switzerland and then in a nursing home in Britain. The unruly daughter of "the father of nations," born on February 28, 1926, died in a nursing home in Wisconsin on November 22, 2011. The Wisconsin authorities only announced her death on November 28.
She had dual citizenship with Russia and the United States, but I don't think she needed either of her passports on her final journey to the bright future.
The views expressed in this article are the author's and may not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
